As is his wont, Radim Vrbata has had a quiet, unassuming All-Star Weekend. There were no drunken shenanigans during the draft for Vrbata, as he simply grinned, enjoying the moment. He was decent during the skills competition, breaking four targets in the accuracy shooting competition in just over 22 seconds, enough to defeat his opponent, John Tavares, but far from the best result of the evening.

All season long, Vrbata has let his play do the talking, leading the Canucks with 18 goals. So far at the All-Star Game, he’s doing the same, opening the scoring for Team Foligno against none other than Roberto Luongo.

It’s been three years since we’ve seen an NHL All-Star Game, as the 2013 game was cancelled due to the lockout and the Olympics wiped it out in 2014.

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for many hockey fans and writers.

This year, the complaints range from the jersey design (Ugly and tacky!) to Zemgus Girgensons leading the fan ballot (Absurd and a mockery!) to certain stars getting left out of the game all together (an All-Star Game without P.K. Subban? Preposterous!). Meanwhile, the game itself is still derided as boring, slow, and meaningless.

Pretty much all of those things are true, to a certain extent, but they all completely and profoundly miss the point.

The 2012 NHL All-Star Game might have been a letdown if you were expecting playoff intensity, but for everyone who went in expecting a fun game of shinny featuring some incredibly talented hockey players, the game completely lived up to expectations.

For Canucks fans, there were a number of highlights, with Daniel and Henrik Sedin playing a major role up front, while Alex Edler was second in icetime for Team Alfredsson and third overall in the game.

Henrik tied Daniel Alfredsson’s team-high with 3 points, while Daniel (Sedin, that is) had two points of his own. And, while Edler was held off the scoresheet, he did tie Scott Hartnell and Shea Weber with a team-high plus-2 rating in a game Team Alfredsson lost by 3 goals.

Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” While I have no proof of it, it seems like Alex Edler has taken Roosevelt’s philosophy on foreign policy as his own personal philosophy. Alex Edler is quiet, humble, and reserved, but also has a massive slap shot from the point.

Edler is a three-time winner of the hardest shot competition at Canucks Superskills, and topped out the radar gun at 103 mph in 2009. Which makes Daniel Alredsson’s decision not to use Edler in the Hardest Shot competition at this year’s All-Star Game absolutely baffling.

A Canuck didn’t get picked until Round 9 and, unsurprisingly, he wasn’t picked by Zdeno Chara. Daniel Sedin, the defending Art Ross winner and 9th in scoring this season, was the 18th pick of the draft. Including the Captains and Alternates, Daniel was the 22nd player to join one of the All-Star teams.

If that seems odd, his brother Henrik is higher in league scoring and went 8 picks later in the 13th round, also to Team Alfredsson. Despite getting picked later than his brother, he managed to chip in a Grade-A chirp when asked about playing against his brother in the last All-Star Game: “It was nice to play with some good players last year, finally.”
Alex Edler, fifth in scoring amongst defencemen, was the last blueliner picked in the draft, having to wait until round 15 before getting picked by – surprise, surprise – Daniel Alfredsson.

Yesterday, we discussed the announcement that Zdeno Chara and Daniel Alfredsson would serve as the two captains for next week’s All-Star Game, and what it meant for the home team. With one captain a sworn enemy of the Canucks, his teammates urging him to build a Canuck-free team, and the other a sworn ally, it seemed reasonable to assume which side of the floor Vancouver’s representatives would wind up on.

But let’s not kid ourselves: Canuck fans have never let inevitability or predictability get in the way of hardcore outrage. Regardless of what happens at the All-Star Draft, even if it runs counter to what we’ve projected, Canuck fans will be furious at the results. Zdeno Chara is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, and not just because he allegedly eats souls and has cloven hooves — when you’re cast as the villain, it doesn’t take much to have your every action interpreted as villainy.

That in mind, we at PITB have decided to examine the possible outcomes of draft day and project not just the draft results but also the resultant outrage, using our handy outrage-o-meter.

On January 11, 2011, Alex Edler was left off the All-Star ballot, and he took it hard. Edler channeled his secret rage into a major production increase, scoring 7 points in his next 8 games, but the rage, like Tony Stark’s arc reactor, ate away at his body from the inside, and a week later, he had to undergo surgery to repair damage in his back. Tru fakt*.

In any case, there will be no rage-induced hot streak/back explosion this year, as Edler, along with Henrik and Daniel Sedin, has been named to the 2012 All-Star Game. Cody Hodgson’s been invited as a rookie representative as well. That sound you heard is Tony Gallagher loading up the typewriter for a piece criticizing the management of Hodgson’s All-Star weekend icetime.

Even in an all-star game, Ryan Kesler takes his assistant captaincy seriously enough to question a call. Here’s Kes, mic’d up for Versus, asking referee Kevin Pollock about his decision to blow the whistle. The ref’s response? “Twenty bucks for the first guy that blew an offside.” Funny stuff. Hat tip to Sean Leahy at [...]

Courtesy of the invaluable and highly beloved CanucksHD, the dedicated Youtuber who is to blogging what the flux capacitor is to time travel, here are the Canucks-related highlights from the NHL Skills Competition. They reinforce three things we might have already known: Ryan Kesler’s pretty fast. But you already knew that. He can make five [...]

After much speculation about who would get picked last at the NHL All-Star Draft, Phil Kessel suffered the ignominy of being the final guy. For the concerned: he’ll live. In fact, I thought the only embarrassing thing about Kessel’s turn as Mr. Irrelevant was the way the NHL tried to pacify him. In an infuriating [...]

Ryan Kesler has been named an alternate captain for the 2011 All-Star Game in Raleigh, North Carolina, as have Mike Green of the Washington Capitals, Patrick Kane of the Chicago Blackhawks, and Martin St. Louis of the Tampa Bay Lightning. Kesler and Green will join Team Staal, with Kane and St. Louis joining Team Lidstrom. [...]

Quick Hits (From Behind) is an irregular feature on Pass it To Bulis, wherein two hockey fans chip in their thoughts on current hockey news and get assessed a five-minute major and a game misconduct. Perhaps you’ve noticed the influx of Canucks-related stories on NHL.com. It’d be hard not to, especially since the team has [...]

The NHL has released the complete All-Star roster for the 2011 All-Star Game and, in a move that I’m sure is shocking to everyone, they picked the right players from the Vancouver Canucks. Both of the Sedins will play, after just Henrik was picked back in 2008. Joining Daniel and Henrik will be Ryan Kesler, [...]

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What just happened at the NHL trade deadline? What did the Canucks do? What's a Baertschi? Who's a Conacher? Daniel and Harrison break down the Canucks moves at the trade deadline and what they mean for the Canucks this season (nothing at all) and in the future (potentially lots?), as well as touching on a few of the other trades around the league. […]

The Canucks have weathered all sorts of injuries this season, largely because of the dependability of their top defence pairing of Alex Edler and Chris Tanev. Now Edler is injured and out for an undetermined length of time, leaving the defence in disarray and the Canucks' season in jeopardy. […]

The Canucks' dominant win over the Pittsburgh Penguins was nearly overshadowed by a couple moments featuring Zack Kassian: the broadcast's bench cam showing him staring at his hands and the massive ovation he received from the Rogers Arena crowd after his goal. […]

The Seahawks lost Super Bowl XLIX in one of the most devastating ways possible, with the game seemingly in hand before it was all so suddenly taken away. What would be the equivalent for the Canucks? The Nathan Lafayette post in 1994? Losing to the Calgary Flames in overtime of game 7 in the 2004 playoffs after Markus Naslund and Matt Cooke combined to tie t […]